I decided that, maybe I've been approaching The Sims 4 wrong. Everytime I've played it, I've always started with a single sim in a small house, but maybe what we need is a group of roommates living in a larger place. I've certainly built quite a few houses that roommates could live in, but those are all minutely detailed. I built every single one of those houses as ModTheSims showpieces, demonstrating the insane level of detail that can go into a Sims 4 house.
When I built The Windelf, I operated on the Winchester principle: "I do one thing, I do it very well, and then I move on." This worked great for Doom maps, not so great for The Sims. What ended up happening most times is I agonised over small details like realistic interaction with the environment. I would spend literal hours, zoomed in as far as I could go, making sure that toilet plunger caddies sat against the wall and counter without clipping into anything, adjusting the heights of towel rings so it wouldn't look like one wrong move and it falls into the toilet, using the exterior clapboards to measure how high up to put a window, shit like that. I mean, sure, there's attention to detail— but there's also retention to anal, and I crossed that line so long ago, I can't even see it anymore. The Windelf wasn't even the only house I did that with. I bragged about it when I made The X at Y, even the Flying J to a certain extent. Although, there, I was more concerned about how consistent that place was with real space; putting a 1-tile-wide void area between each room just in case the hourly-rates get too noisy for the holidaymakers. Certainly, I avoid putting plumbing fixtures on exterior-facing walls, because I've watched way too much This Old House, so I know about the dangers of frozen pipes. The problem here is, plumbing fixtures don't freeze in The Sims. There are no hourly-rate guests at the motel. So far as I know, fires still can't travel between rooms. There is no reason why I should be adhering to the rules of real space when I build stuff in The Sims Anything. And, since I'm not making MTS lots anymore, there's especially no reason to do it in The Sims 4.
So, I readjusted my thought process and started a new savefile in 4. I spoke before of a kind of prototype trans-simself named Katie Kissimmee, so I decided to move her and her stepsister, Clarissa Morinaga, onto the empty lot in southeast Willow Creek. That's always where I get hung up in 4; I always put off making my A-story household until the rest of the neighbourhood is complete. Except, it's never complete. Something always happens and I end up abandoning the idea because it's too much work or I forget where I was going with it. So, this time, move my A-story sims onto a blank lot and start from absolute scratch. I just built and furnished rooms, not thinking too much about real space, and giving myself extra money where necessary, and we arrive at a complete house, ready to be played in.
One of the places where The Sims 4 fell down was in storytelling. The game has zero capacity for storytelling, which is a major paradigm shift from the story-centric Sims Classic. Graphic novels were second-nature to The Sims 1 & 2, but 3 and 4 have none of that. Hell, 4 doesn't even let you write character biographies! This is really too bad for a number of reasons; not the least of which is 4 is keenly suited for storytelling, with the realistic buildings and people you can make; and that I'm much better at storytelling than I am at building. If 4 had the same photo album capabilities that 1 does, I could be writing such moving stories with such relateable characters, they'd have you crying at your computer within 15 minutes. But it doesn't.
This particular story would be about a girl who had a turbulent childhood whose mum got married to a man with a daughter from a previous relationship, and they grow up to be more committed to each other than to any romantic relationship. Then, she meets a guy who develops computer software, who is actually a trans man who just wants to be one of the guys, cracking bad jokes with his friends at the sports bar; except he doesn't have any friends who like to go there. Then we meet boyfriend's roommates: a fiery redhead lesbian whose second language is Yiddish, and a Casanova-looking guy who is totally sex-repulsed and only has eyes for alternative electricity. We're talkin' "1990s rom-coms if they were as good as the gen-z trans lesbians think they are"-levels of story depth here.
I guess, now that I've done all this big talk, I need to actually write something. See, when it comes down to it, I may not have a game that's capable of generating graphic novels, but I do have a website. Besides, who needs 1 photo per line when an illustration per page will do the job fine? We'll do a mature picture book instead of a graphic novel.
Tomorrow, though. I have to eat dinner now.